Part 2 — Chapter 2

Summary

• Mirella lived in a duplex in Ohio with her mother and older sister, Susanna, in a fairly secluded region with a Walmart and farmland near their house. Their mother worked two jobs and had very little time to spend with her daughters.
• Every morning, their mother would drop them off at school before dawn, where they spend over 10 hours (including the after-school program). At the end of the day, the school bus dropped them a half mile from home, and they had to walk the rest of the way under an overpass.
• One winter evening when Mirella was nine and Susanna was eleven, they heard gunshots as they were about to cross the overpass. At the time, they dismissed them as the noise of a car backfiring.
• Entering the overpass, they found two men on the ground, one dead and one twitching, a third slumped against the wall with a gun in his hand, and a fourth ran away.
• The man with the gun woke up to the sound of police sirens. He looked at Mirella and said her name before the police arrived and arrested the man. The next day there was a story in the paper about the incident.
• In the years following the incident, Mirella managed to convince herself that she had only imagined the man with the gun saying her name.
• As an adult in back of a Manhattan taxi, she recalled the traumatizing incident and realized that the gunman was a man named Gaspery Roberts.
• In the taxi, she received a text from her girlfriend, asking if she was coming to a party. She altered her location to SoHo in response to the text.